Capital Fellows

The city’s mayoral race is serious entertainment.

Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson are in a very close contest.Credit GERALD SCARFE

As the mayoral campaign in London officially got under way late last month, it occurred to me that, no matter how the voting turns out, Londoners will be electing a mayor with no equivalent in American politics. The incumbent, Ken Livingstone, is considerably more involved with free enterprise than he was when he was known as Red Ken, but he still describes himself as a Socialist and is still up to planning a celebration in Trafalgar Square next year for the fiftieth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s revolution. The American political scene includes nobody who has ever been called red anything. Livingstone’s challenger, a Conservative M.P. and former journalist named Boris Johnson, is sometimes described as a toff—a term that does not exist in the United States, since nobody, in or out of politics, quite fits the bill. (“Preppy” doesn’t come close, and neither does “white shoe.”) Johnson, whose full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, went to Eton and to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a member of a club, the Bullingdon, that is literally out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, having served as the model for the collection of drunken, furniture-smashing toffs presented as the Bollinger Club in “Decline and Fall.” According to the satirical magazine Private Eye, Johnson’s plan for Trafalgar Square is to replace the pigeons with pheasants so that his friends can shoot them. Among ten mayoral candidates, Livingstone and Johnson are the only ones thought to have a chance of winning, but even if the election is won by the candidate who is a distant third in the polls—Brian Paddick, a Liberal Democrat who was formerly a deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police—the mayor-elect still wouldn’t be the sort of politician Americans are familiar with: after a few days in London, I began to think that Paddick’s name must be particularly difficult for Londoners to remember, because I rarely heard him referred to as anything except “the gay policeman.”

The word “toff ” does not describe Boris Johnson much better than Red Ken describes Ken Livingstone. One model that Americans have of the privileged Englishman is based on what used to be called a “chinless wonder”—a sort of stiff who is (1) arrogant and (2) a bit thick. Johnson is neither. At Oxford, he was, in addition to being a member of the Bullingdon Club, the president of the Oxford Union and a student of classics. In 1999, when he was thirty-five, he was named the editor of The Spectator, a right-wing weekly, and was thought to be in line to be the editor of the Daily Telegraph, where he was a columnist, if he hadn’t begun concentrating on politics. His manner is not stilted but what the English sometimes call “shambolic”—chaotic or disorganized—even when he is riding the bicycle that he often uses to get around London. Johnson, I was told by Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, plays to “a stereotype of the bumbling P. G. Wodehouse sort of toff that people find attractive.” Even Ken Livingstone sometimes says, usually just before he says that Johnson is not the sort of person you’d want to put in charge of a large city, “Boris is charming.”

In a 2006 biography entitled “Boris,” an old friend of Johnson’s named Andrew Gimson maintains that the stage-Englishman presentation masks not only a considerable intelligence but a fierce ambition: according to one of his siblings, little Boris’s childhood goal was to be the “world king,” and Gimson, among others, believes that he has lowered his sights only as far down as the Prime Ministership. Still, Johnson is probably best known for his humor, often self-deprecatory and occasionally unintentional—especially as displayed in several appearances, much revisited through DVDs and YouTube, on a television show called “Have I Got News for You.” The label that Johnson’s opponents try to stick him with in the campaign is not “toff ” but “clown” or, particularly, “buffoon.” If he is not best known for his humor, he is best known for his hair—hair that is blonder than is normally seen on a human older than about the age of five and is customarily worn in the style favored by English sheepdogs between groomings. According to his mother, blond hair is so strong in the Johnson family that “it defies attack from the genes of anybody else.” Of her son’s four children, she says, two of them have hair just as blond as his, even though his wife is half Indian. Because of his hair, Boris Johnson is said to be the only politician in England who is instantly recognizable from behind.

Although he has some forebears who were prominent in law or journalism or scholarship, Johnson’s background would be considered a bit spotty by the sort of toff who grew up in one of those sixteenth-century castles which come equipped with family retainers and an ancient coat of arms. One of his great-grandfathers was Turkish and another was Jewish. Having a diverse family tree is hardly a disadvantage in running for office in London, which, in addition to having long-established communities from the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies, is now a place where the waitress bringing you a sausage roll in a typically English pub is likely to be from Estonia and where there are so many Poles in the construction trade that I’ve heard Londoners refer to the children’s television character Bob the Builder as Bobski the Builder. “Few Londoners have entirely English descent and Boris is no exception,” Johnson’s campaign Web site says, in a biographical note. Johnson, who refers to himself as a “one-man melting pot,” claimed not long ago that his great-great-grandmother was a Circassian slave whose freedom was purchased by his great-great-grandfather. That claim—not one, it should be said, that came accompanied by heavy documentation—appeared in the Observer, which further quoted Johnson as saying, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Livingstone.”

When I was travelling to a Boris Johnson campaign appearance one day by taxi, the driver told me that he’d like to meet Johnson. I assumed that he was an admirer: the drivers of what Londoners call black cabs, most of whom are white men of middle years, tend toward conservative political views; a London friend of mine described them as essentially poujadistes. “I’d like to ask him why he bumped into my taxi on his bicycle,” the driver went on. “There he was, big black coat, blond hair, talking on a mobile. Ran right into me. Then he just rode away.”

“Then you’re going to vote against him?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’d rather have George W. Bush for mayor than fucking Livingstone.”

“You might want to give that one a little thought,” I said.

I had been finding my way around London mostly by the Underground, despite Johnson’s description of the system under Livingstone’s management as “armpit-nuzzling hell,” and I was astonished that when I’d finally climbed into a taxi it turned out to be the one taxi in London that Boris Johnson had hit with his bicycle. Then it occurred to me that, since Johnson is an inveterate cyclist who seems to have distraction as his default mode, he might have crashed into a majority of the taxis in London. Given the way taxi-drivers feel about Livingstone, a lot of those struck would probably vote for Johnson anyway, but, unfortunately for him, many of them live outside the city.

They’ve had decades to become acquainted with Livingstone. He has been involved in the city’s political life since he was elected, as a Labourite, to the Lambeth borough council, in 1971, at the age of twenty-five. Livingstone is a polished, on-message speaker. He can also be witty; in fact, he has made just as many appearances on “Have I Got News for You” as Johnson has. In a new biography called “Ken”—which made headlines last week, causing Livingstone to acknowledge that he has, in addition to the two small children known to the public, three children from previous relationships—Andrew Hosken, of the BBC, writes, “Many people find Livingstone personally amiable and approachable but he has always been capable of great ruthlessness and it is pointless to deny it.” There has been a certain relentlessness about his rise—a willingness to use positions that others treated casually as a way to build a power base, a willingness (on the Greater London Council) to stage a putsch in his own party immediately after an election as a way of taking over the leadership. He has always been blunt enough to strike some as rude. For whatever reason, he evokes strong feelings in his critics. In “Ken,” Hosken says of the Mayor, “He has been likened to the Plague.”

Even people who speak harshly of Livingstone, though, tend to begin their criticism with something like “Mind you, he’s done some good things.” The Mayor can make a persuasive case for London’s having prospered mightily since he came to office, in 2000. He can talk knowledgeably about grand projects such as Crossrail, an enhancement of the public-transportation system which is budgeted at sixteen billion pounds, and he can quote statistics on, say, a pedestrian’s chances for survival if hit by a car at twenty miles per hour versus being hit at forty miles per hour. He was reëlected for a second term in 2004. A few months ago, the odds quoted by London bookies reflected a widespread feeling that on Election Day, which is May 1st, Ken Livingstone would be elected to a third term. But, as the campaign began, a poll indicated, to the surprise of many, that Boris Johnson was in the lead.

Livingstone was long identified with an element of the Labour Party known to some as the Loony Left, although Hosken and others have argued that he always had a strong streak of pragmatism. He was reviled by New Labour leaders such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as much as he was by the Tories. Once he was elected mayor, though, his far-left tendencies became visible more in what the English call “gesture politics”—his chumminess with Hugo Chávez, say, or his willingness to refer to George W. Bush as “the greatest threat to life on this planet”—than in the policies he follows. In fact, there are some who believe that the gestures are made to keep the old left in line while he pursues his agenda. Livingstone told me that he makes the gestures because he believes in them, although he did acknowledge that “several letters came in saying, ‘We were losing hope for you and then you said that the American Ambassador was “a chiselling little crook.” ’ ”

The man who used to treat financial institutions as just one more curse of capitalism now boasts that London, which was at risk of being overtaken by Paris and Frankfurt when he got elected, may have overtaken New York as the world’s financial capital. He is criticized by the left for his coziness with property developers and by the preservationists for his willingness to transmogrify the traditional London skyline with new high-rises—both of which policies he defends as levers for prying affordable housing out of the developers. When the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer began talking about taxing rich foreigners who make their headquarters in London, the former Red Ken came to their defense. “Who doesn’t change?” he asked when I mentioned this apparent transformation to him one day. “This is not the world I would have created. I’d hoped by now we would have had a Socialist world. But it’s the world we’re living in, and either you can not engage with it or you can try and make sure within these constraints you do the best you can.” In the eighties, Livingstone was best known for irritating Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with his gestures as the leader of the Greater London Council—inviting Sinn Féin leaders in for a talk, for instance, and engaging in the sort of activities that Private Eye’s Ian Hislop sums up as “giving grants to lesbian dance collectives.” Finally, Mrs. Thatcher had the council abolished by an act of Parliament, something that many Tories had wanted to do for years. These days, Livingstone is known as the man who presided over London’s commercial renaissance and won London the 2012 Olympics and, in the face of opposition even from his own advisers, instituted a congestion charge in order to reduce traffic in the center of the city.

Livingstone’s opponents in the mayoral race sometimes grumble about some aspect of the congestion charge. Johnson, for instance, is opposed to a supplemental fee that next fall will increase to twenty-five pounds (fifty dollars) the cost of entering the center of the city in gas-guzzlers such as S.U.V.s—vehicles that in London are sometimes called “Chelsea tractors,” a reference to the contrast between the tastes and the transportation needs of London’s most expensive borough. But the core congestion charge has been successful enough to be accepted as permanent. (The American Ambassador got called a chiselling little crook because the embassy refused to pay it, claiming diplomatic exemption from any form of taxation.) Whatever effect the charge has had on congestion, I was told by Tony Travers, an expert on the city at the London School of Economics, “As a piece of brand management, it was brilliant.” It put the spotlight on London as an innovative city—a pacesetter to be followed by cities like Milan and Stockholm and, if Michael Bloomberg has his way, New York—even though the first city to impose a congestion charge was actually not London but Singapore.

The way Londoners feel about Ken Livingstone has some similarity to the way New Yorkers once felt about Ed Koch. Like Koch, who at the beginning of his reign struck people as a refreshing New York wiseacre, Livingstone impressed even those who didn’t agree with him politically as a “cheeky chappie”—an irreverent working-class maverick who wasn’t afraid to stand up to the rulers of his own party or to the Iron Lady herself. Now that he’s been in office eight years, though, some of Livingstone’s blunt talk can strike people as arrogant rather than cheeky. Also like Koch, he has been in power long enough for charges of cronyism and corruption to creep up around some of those close to him—although nobody has ever accused him of enriching himself personally. There are those who may criticize Livingstone but still intend to vote for him, partly on the ground that, as Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian, the Conservatives have “put up a clown to run a great global city.” A Times columnist named David Aaronovitch took that position last month, arguing that “Ken, wrong on all the things that don’t matter in a London mayor, has been right on almost all the things that do.” The column ran under the headline “MR. HORRID, NOT MR. CHAOTIC, IS RIGHT FOR LONDON.”

In background and manner, the contrasts between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson are extreme. Johnson’s father, also an Oxford graduate, is an environmentalist and author who has been a member of the European Parliament and stood (unsuccessfully) for a seat in the House of Commons in the last election; Livingstone’s father was a merchant seaman who became a window-washer. One of Johnson’s journalistic sidelines has been writing a motoring column for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, a task that obligates him to test-drive high-performance automobiles at high speeds; Livingstone has never had a driver’s license. As a well-connected former president of the Oxford Union, Johnson did not have to begin his political career by running for a seat on a borough council; he ran for Parliament. (He got the Tory nomination but was defeated in the general election; four years later, he won the seat at Henley-on-Thames.) Johnson’s first job was in management consulting, but he left in a week, because, as he later put it, “Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth-profit matrix, and stay conscious”; then, through family contacts, he moved to the Times, where he was fired a short time later for making up a quote attributed to his own godfather. Livingstone’s first job was caring for animals in a cancer-research laboratory. He remained there for eight years.

Yet they are similar in many ways. Both have had difficulty with their national parties and even now rarely mention party affiliation on campaign literature. Livingstone was ejected from the Labour Party when he decided to run for mayor as an independent after losing the Labour nomination in 2000, in a selection process that bore some similarities to the vote-counting in the United States later that year. (He was invited to rejoin Labour toward the end of his first term. “I said yes immediately,” he told me. “I knew that once I was back in the Party they couldn’t afford to see me fail.”) Johnson was removed from a ministerial position by the then Tory leader Michael Howard during a period of so much hanky-panky on the staff of The Spectator that some people started referring to the magazine as The Sextator. As was recounted widely in the tabloids and in a London play by two staffers whom Johnson continued to employ, a columnist was having an affair with a receptionist, Johnson was having an affair with another columnist, and the publisher managed to upstage both of them by having an affair with the Home Secretary. Officially, Johnson lost his ministerial job not for having an affair but for lying about it publicly: he had dismissed stories of the relationship as “an inverted pyramid of piffle” when, as it happened, they were not an inverted pyramid of piffle. After a brief banishment from home, Johnson returned to his wife and children; an article in the Sunday Times recently quoted an unidentified admirer as saying, “As well as being a philanderer, he’s a great family man.”

Livingstone and Johnson also both have a tendency to say or write things that cause their supporters to cringe and their opponents to savor what in American politics would be thought of as a “gotcha” moment. Even as Johnson announced his candidacy, he was attacked for a 2002 Telegraph column talking about the Queen’s being greeted in Commonwealth visits by “flag-waving piccaninnies” and predicting that when Tony Blair arrived in the Congo “the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief.” Livingstone can match that one. In 2005, as he emerged from a City Hall reception, he was approached by a reporter from the Evening Standard, a newspaper that customarily treats him roughly, and he responded to a less than provocative question (“How did tonight go?”) by comparing the reporter to a German war criminal and a concentration-camp guard. Alas, the reporter in question, a fill-in on the beat, was named Finegold, and his tape recorder was running.

The candidates have been through enough of these incidents for a clear difference to emerge in their response to being accused of bigotry or insensitivity or cruelty. Johnson apologizes. In “Boris,” Andrew Gimson writes, “Boris believes in the imperfectability of mankind, and especially of himself.” Boris Johnson is a virtuoso of saying he’s sorry. He is likely to come up with something about himself that is marginally less flattering than the accuser had been willing to say. It’s what some have called his “Cripes!” or “Oh, crikey!” presentation. Once, when he was trying to be an editor and a Member of Parliament at the same time, he was ordered by Michael Howard to apologize to an entire city for an editorial in The Spectator saying that Liverpool had wallowed in “mawkish sentimentality” over the death of one of its residents as a hostage in Iraq and the deaths of a number of its football fans in a stadium crush. He spent a day in Liverpool, apologizing here and apologizing there, in the way that an old-time Chicago pol might have travelled around delivering Christmas turkeys. Livingstone, when accused of having said something he shouldn’t have said, takes a completely different approach: he attacks the accuser.

Ken Livingstone is the only mayor London has ever had. (The City of London, essentially the financial district, has long had a ceremonial Lord Mayor.) After Mrs. Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council, there was no central governing authority in the city until Tony Blair instituted a directly elected mayor, fourteen years later—dispatching people to New York and Boston to see how the position might be structured. (During the interregnum, Livingstone was in Parliament, an institution in which he did not thrive—perhaps, some thought, because collegiality has never been his long suit.) Under Livingstone, the office of mayor has become a substantial platform for carrying out grand themes; London has been prominent in issues like public transportation and the role played by large cities in reducing global warming. Because London so dominates the United Kingdom, its mayor is sometimes thought of as the second most visible officeholder in the country. But the day-to-day governing of London is still done largely by the boroughs; they are responsible for trash pickup and education and just about anything else that is of concern to the average homeowner. The mayor has veto power over developments of a certain size—thus Livingstone’s association with high-rises—but basic planning power is held by the boroughs. Through the budget of the police board and its appointments, the mayor has some say in the policing of the city, but the police commissioner is appointed by the Home Secretary. When I mentioned the contest for mayor to a London friend, he said, “ ‘Mayor’ is a misnomer. They should really call the job ‘transport commissioner.’ ” The mayor does have almost total control of transportation, which is one reason that people campaigning for the office talk so often about traffic flow and the articulated vehicles that Londoners call “bendy buses” and Crossrail, which Livingstone likes to say could be a financial disaster for the city if put in the hands of someone who has no experience in such matters. In just about every area except transportation, the mayor has limitations—limitations that some people believe Blair and his New Labour ministers imposed when designing the job because of their concern that Ken Livingstone, their old nemesis from the Loony Left, might get it.

Times have changed. During the 2000 mayoral campaign, Tony Blair said that a victory for Ken Livingstone would be a “disaster.” A few weeks ago, Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, appeared with Livingstone to offer his endorsement—although the tenor of the occasion put neither man at risk of being accused of mawkish sentimentality. What impact an endorsement by Brown might have remains in question. A recent Sunday Times survey showed that the Party is at its lowest ebb since 1983, when it went down to a disastrous defeat with a twenty-two-thousand-word election manifesto that was characterized as “the longest suicide note in history.” Since the mayoral campaign will culminate in what is seen as the most important vote between now and the next general election, both Brown and his opposite number, the Tory leader David Cameron, have a considerable stake in the outcome, whether the candidates are willing to wave party banners or not.

According to one theory I heard in London, a Johnson victory would present Cameron with a bonus beyond party momentum—the breaking of the “posh barrier.” The theory holds that the willingness of London voters to support someone as posh as Boris Johnson would indicate a willingness to turn the national government over to Cameron, who is even posher. Cameron is the first Conservative leader who could be described as “hideously privileged” (his own words) since Mrs. Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter, turned her back on the swells thirty years ago. He went to Eton and Oxford, where he appeared with Johnson in a Bullingdon Club picture that surfaced last year; the members, most of them Old Etonians and all of them dressed in tails, were posing for their annual group shot shortly before a dinner that concluded abruptly with a potted plant being thrown through the restaurant’s window. (“The party ended up with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the botanical gardens, and trying to escape the police dogs,” Johnson told the Telegraph, in one of his signature confessions of man’s imperfectability. “And once we were in the cells we became pathetic namby-pambies.”) Most of the people I spoke to question whether a posh barrier actually exists—surveys on that subject have apparently been inconclusive—and Johnson brushes off any talk of a class problem. He does not live in Chelsea but in Islington, an area that is popular with journalists and other such run-of-the-mill strivers. As befits someone who has climbed the ladder from slave ancestry, he likes to refer to himself as middle class.

The strategy of the Livingstone campaign is to frame the contest as being between a man who has cared deeply about London all his life and has demonstrated an ability to deliver city services—that’s the Mayor—and an inexperienced celebrity who offers a lot of jokes and a short attention span. Livingstone says that the mayor of a city the size of London has to be right on ninety per cent of all decisions and a hundred per cent of the big decisions—an implication that it’s a job in which “Cripes!” won’t do. Although there is a rough balance between Conservative and Labour voters in Greater London, Livingstone believes that the city has “a progressive majority.” He warns that, on issues like the environment and transportation and housing, “Boris is about rolling back to a Britain that doesn’t exist.” In other words, the backup argument to the argument that Boris Johnson is a clown is that he is not a clown. At his campaign launch, Livingstone answered a reporter who asked about whether he considered Johnson a buffoon by saying, “I don’t think Boris is a buffoon. I think Boris is the most dangerous right-wing politician we face, because behind all the charm and self-deprecation is a hard-line agenda of the right.”

There was a time when I thought that some slightly eccentric mayors were being elected in large American cities partly because the voters, figuring that large American cities were ungovernable anyway, decided that they might as well put someone in city hall who was at least entertaining. Apparently, those in charge of the Johnson campaign—including Lynton Crosby, an Australian political consultant who made his name with the successive election victories of John Howard—believed that entertainment-seekers alone were not enough to put Johnson over the top. The campaign has had as its first priority establishing Boris Johnson in the public mind as a serious man. That is the base upon which they can present Johnson as an agent of change and Livingstone as a man who is, in Johnson’s words, “stale and out of touch.” The Conservatives have always been wary of Johnson’s humor. He has a sort of postmodern delivery that is not easy to alter—as if he were bemusedly watching himself do something as silly as arguing political issues. In one debate, during a long discussion about the horrors of littering, he managed to draw loud laughter merely by saying, as if announcing a major economic initiative, “Can I give you a policy on chewing gum?” But he is no longer the Boris Johnson who said, during a generalelection campaign, “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” (The automotive part of that incentive package would be a bit tarnished if Ken Livingstone is still mayor next fall: you would have to pay twenty-five pounds a day to drive it into Central London.) At times, Johnson can appear to know as many statistics as Livingstone does—although such displays are likely to be followed by a news release from his opponents claiming that his numbers are way off. “He’s straining to be serious,” Tony Travers told me. “It’s as if Lynton Crosby had a gun on him: ‘If you get out of line, I’ll shoot you.’ ”

While I was in London, I accompanied Johnson on campaign stops in some West London neighborhoods, like Hillingdon and Uxbridge—the sort of suburban areas that are not Livingstone’s natural territory. (Richard Barnes, a Tory member of the London Assembly, who was with us, said of the Mayor, “He’s been in Havana more than he’s been in Hillingdon.”) During the trip, I asked Johnson if humor suppression had been a problem. “A lot of people are complaining that I’m being too serious,” he said. “My point to them is that unless you take yourself a bit seriously you don’t take other people seriously. It is a very serious election.” When I asked him why he was interested in a job that involved a lot of niggling details even though he didn’t seem to be a niggling-detail sort of person, he said, “The attraction of the job is that it’s so deeply intricate. Every decision you make involves some sort of political theory. And all of them involve some sort of deep reflection on where the city’s going to be in twenty years.” I glanced around to see if I could spot Lynton Crosby with a gun, but he was nowhere in sight.

At a mall in Uxbridge, Johnson attracted a number of young people who wanted their pictures taken with him. He is said to have great appeal to young voters, many of whom were children when Ken Livingstone was valued as a cheeky chappie and an entertaining guest on “Have I Got News for You.” As two young men in their late teens got on either side of Johnson so that a friend could take a picture with his cell-phone camera, one of them said, “You’re a legend, Boris. Crack a joke.”

“If I do,” Johnson said, “I’m in trouble.” ♦

Calvin Trillin has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1963, when the magazine published “An Education in Georgia,” an account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia.